Weird Ol' Jankélévitch

There is something so delicious, so sensually pleasing, when you come across a thinker whose ideas fit – not your own ideas, but impulses that have yet to be properly formed into ideas – but now here they are, on the page, full-formed, spelled out clearly, substantiated by the evidently great amount of thinking, reading, listening behind it...  a lifetime’s work of deep thought and deep listening – and here you are, miraculously in accord – what you're reading strikes a chord, one that resonates across your whole being, like a tuning fork!

So it is with Vladimir Jankélévitch  and his book Music and the Ineffable

Can’t even remember how I came across it, what led me to it...

Vlad was a philosopher and music scholar, a contemporary of and an influence (probably) on Barthes and such

Gist of his polemic is that the essence of music, the most important and deepest yet also blindingly obvious and on-the-surface quality of it – is that it is something that cannot be spoken of, or written about. He, paradoxically, spends a whole book writing rivetingly about this impossiblity.

Attempts to write about music might have pleasing side effects and induce pleasure in their own right, but they are extraneous, existing to one side of the thing-in-itself

They do not, ultimately, illuminate what they are talking about

They do not capture the quintessence nor successfully convert its sensations into the currency of thought

Music is not in fact a form of thought.... nor is to compose or play music an act of thinking, at least so far as thinking involves language and reasoning

Music is not reducible to, nor can it be or properly understood as operating within the domain of  Meaning.  

Indeed "understanding" itself is not really the appropriate word.

For music doesn’t contain anything that could be sensibly called truth  

Nor does it work through representation

 

There is nothing to understand, but everything to be felt

Janko junks the idea that music develops or has depth

Since the sensuous surface of music is all that is – it follows that there is nothing behind it that is the truth of it, that can then be exposed or revealed

Moreover there is nothing outside the music that it refers to or derives it meaning from...

(NB I'm talking about music here as opposed to stuff that can be attached to the music - like lyrics)

Vladimir's stance is anti-hermeneutic –in that sense very much like Sontag’s "Against Interpretation" and I wonder if perchance she had read it (La Musique et L'Ineffable it was published in 1961, in French only, but only translated into English decades later)

 Ah but Richard is "truth" even the right word for what music gives us?

According to the Man like Vlad...

Music is not mimetic, it doesn’t depict, nor does it really evoke

Music does, music acts, music moves, music functions

It is an enchantment of time

Vladdo uses the concept of Charm, which is philosophically freighted and derived from a particular thinker, but is understandable in the original magical sense of the word, i.e. enchants (interesting that this word has "chants" in it -  enchants comes from the French enchanter, which descends from Latin incantare, from in- ‘in’ + cantare ‘sing’)

Music fascinates and enthralls rather than signifies or enlightens

It lightens, irradiates

 

Two of  VJ's key concepts are "charm" and the word "drastic" 

Music beguiles (charm has a magical undertone but it also simply means a kind of attraction or magnetism that can't be explained)

By 'drastic' I think he means a dramatic, decisive, inarguable, unilateral effect on the listener, imposed whether you consent to it or not 

Now I’ve long thought – probably since I first began formulating unformed thoughts about music, which would have been the Monitor years—that pop and rock are fundamentally irrational. Well, all music is: its effects on us bypass the faculties of reason and, at the extreme, sanity. 

For sure, music can be harnessed for various ends, which might be more or less reasonable (as a vehicle for ideologies, beliefs, wisdom). It can be deployed for individual purposes by those gifted with its magic. 

Critics and commentators can reason about music, about its cultural context and its social repercussions; they say things that make sense, that are more or less accurate or persuasive, about what surrounds music, or precedes music (the motivations and ideas of the artists) or comes out of music, "when the music's over". 

But at heart and at base, music, even at its gentlest, is a kind of violence: it is an involuntary alteration of the listener’s mood, it incites or quells energy through intoxication, subjugation, force, enervation, melting.   

Reference or association is either non-existent, tenuous, or arbitrarily imposed, a completely external application to the music itself.

One version of “what this music is about” is substitutable by another

With program music, the association – narrative, landscape – does not inhere in any meaningful way to the sound itself.

The glommed-on story is not the truth of the music, and is only its referent via an agreed upon convention of listeners and critics. 

 

Now popular music of course is entirely based around this arbitrary imposition of a meaning to music

Since it is mostly – in the modern era, the post-jazz era  – largely vocal and lyric-based

"Words and Music by _____"

Today, outside the specialist realm of dance music, there is very little popular music that doesn’t have words welded to it that tell us what to feel, instruct us in what the song is about

But, but, the music of a song, any song, has no inherent relation to the lyrics

Any song you can think of could work almost as well, if different lyrics were substituted

Except in the very loosest and vaguest form  - the mood, tempo, the inherited associations of certain kinds of key, vocal timbre.... 

Yes, it's true that lyrics can seem to fit the music perfectly, directing how we receive its sensations and emotions

Rather like set and setting with a drug trip

And this is indeed the miracle achieved by a great pop song – you feel like “Eleanor Rigby” could only have the words that "go with" that music.

But what Janko is talking about helps to explain why music can have the opposite effect on us that its lyrics ought to induce

The paradox of sad music making us happy, uplifted

Now The Doors "LA Woman" – ought to be desolate, faintly apocalyptic, and sorrowful – in fact it’s a celebration, rolling energy, all ease and glory. 

A good example of this is that the lyrics of "Street Fighting Man" were decided upon very late in the process - after the music was basically done. Originally it had lyrics about something else altogether. 

Precisely because of the power of music, the lyrics that were attached it to feel indelibly imprinted on the music and on popular memory, creating the feeling that this is the only thing the song could ever have been about. 

But it might have been just as potent sonically and rhythmically with a bunch of words that were typical Stones stuff about chasing or demeaning a  woman. 

Conversely, the lyrics of "Street Fighting Man" would have zero incendiary qualities if clad in the sound of, say, Poco.

I also read recently that Exile on Main Street had a rather different working title - Tropical Disease. Imagine if that had stuck! The actual title is so determinative of how we respond to the music and how we read the whole Stones vibe of that moment. 

Bit like how the title "Moments In Love" - chosen by Morley - determines how you respond to the music, originally an instrumental with no determinate or intended feeling. Such that Ann Dudley said the title alone deserves half the publishing credit. 

Another good example out of so many - Roxy Music. Initially Bryan Ferry wrote the vocal melody and lyric at the piano. But at a certain point, quite early on, the band would write the whole track first, independently - and then Ferry would compose the vocal melody and come up with the words (being quite secretive about that process, as well as doing it at the very last minute - Manzanera told me of the surprise and the suspense re. what the words would be). So for instance "Mother of Pearl" - the music was created first, and then Ferry came up with what the song was "about".  An indication of how "about" is not really an applicable word to use in regards to music-qua-music.

(I believe this was the case with quite a few Smiths songs - specifically "How Soon Is Now", which Marr created almost entirely on his own one weekend). 

So yes, it's a convention that we all tacitly agree to adhere to - fans, critics, creators - that lyrics of songs and their titles have some kind of  quasi-organic relationship to the music. That the semantic content is what the music is about, what it dramatizes. 

But consider all the stories about how albums are actually written - so many involve the words being scrabbled together at the last minute in the studio. Stories of how the lyric-writing process starts with abstract vocalese or nonsense words, that only later get formed into lyrics. 

The fated-feeling relationship between form and content is one of the great illusions pulled off by music -  a testament to the way the music itself conjures a feeling of inevitability . You feel that the song could only have sounded this way, in this definitive execution - and as a knock-on effect, the words inherit or acquire the same rightness. (But of course there are demos and alternate takes and different mixes that in themselves show the contingent nature of any recording or writing)

Of course classical music – instrumental art music  - often does have a relationship to the text

Not really meaning lieder here

But the tradition of composers taking inspiration from poetry (or books, novels, plays, scripture, myth, folk tales) for works of instrumental music.

Often literally setting the poem to music, or being inspired by it, sent on a musical journey

Yet the relationship of the poem to the musical outcome is actually largely – ultimately - arbitrary

As can be seen by examples of different composers using the same poem or sacred text - and coming up with a completely different outcome, musically.

The poem is a bit like the yeast in bread making -  or some other germinal element

The sand in the oyster that results in the pearl – a kind of inspirational irritant

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The elusive meta-ness of music - even a kind of tautologous opacity - is something that Boston reach for in their song "More Than A Feeling"

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Now as an example of this syndrome where you read the book and it articulates and ratifies what you already feel.... here's something I wrote about a year before reading Jankélévitch, on the ineluctable mystery of Television and Tom Verlaine's guitar:

The lyrics are purest dream -  interpretation is beside the point, at once superfluous and sullying.  The music is the main thing, but that too defies description or characterisation. Television's kinetic abstraction works through elemental dynamics of tension-build and climax. It's not about anything except its own structure-in-motion, the tone and timbre of the immaterial material out of which it constructs itself before your ears. Something for the technical guitar magazines, in a way, and yet that kind of terminology gets no closer to the magic than mind's eye guff  does. 

Surveying the literature on Television, even the most penetrating writers... I don't think anyone really gets near the magic and the mystery.  I found a lot of it rather predictably evasive - not consciously so but veering off nonetheless to talk about the lyrics (in actual fact, usually just quoting favorite lyrics) or inter-band dynamics, the conflict with Richard Hell, how Television fit and didn't fit into the CBGB punk scene, Verlaine's personality / artistic-literary interests and influences, the legacy etc. 

The magic and mystery gets written around more than written about. Which is something that goes on with a lot of music  - maybe most music -  but seems a particularly glaring absence with a group that is so purely musical - that says what it has to say through the music ( "say" itself is inadequate, not the right word -  when communication is so ecstatically non-verbal, can it really be described as communication? It's more like an electric communion, a pure zapping transfer of energy... like being electrocuted. "Lightning struck itself" is the perfect meta-lyric in fact).

My favorite out of the pieces I've read remains the Nick Kent paean - not necessarily because it gets much closer to the quick of it  - but because it's so immediate - there's a feeling of moment in the cadences  - you imagine the writer trembling with the sense of occasion,  the privilege of being the one who gets to mount the podium and introduce the world to this transformational record, this miracle... it's a tour de force of magisterially controlled excitement - in that sense, a prose mirror-image of its subject, Marquee Moon the album and the song.

This Nick Kent piece makes me think of what Artforum critic Carter Ratcliff said of his flamboyant contemporary Rene Ricard - not the negative carping, but the stuff about "gestures made in the vicinity" of a work, working not so much as analysis but as a kind of heralding, "Behold the New!""

  

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Some earlier thoughts of mine in this vicinity, on the subject of "the kind of rap I like"

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Jankélévitch in his own words